...So I lay awake in the dark thinking of CarletonWatkins, blind, agéd, his mind slowly deteriorating in the State
Hospital for the Insane at Napa -- alone,
destitute, forsaken -- his wife, younger, once his assistant, having
now taken to referring to herself as his "widow"
for convenience -- the man who had invented the mammoth camera,
who had made the world aware of Yosemite Valley,
ascended the Whitney Glacier, explored the Columbia River Gorge,
given the surging power of nature at The Geysers
image life -- imagining Watkins' broken
consciousness adrift and wandering amid an endless flow of broken
images -- Shasta floating as an aethereal cloudlike
presence in the clear thin-air distance, towering, lifting
the mind to the sky -- the shattered mirror bits
of a flood of broken glass-plate memory
negatives -- the jagged night, tectonic, slowly
passing in the lamentation-drenched
ward -- a colloidal spill of illumination pooling
beneath the threshold of the visible, spilling
in from the yellowed corridor walls -- outcries
of inmates in isolation, unanswered -- the peak of Lassen
as seen from the great crack'd nevadite sea of "Chaos" crags
upon whose pyroclastic waves the untethered
mind now moves beyond present time across the blur of a vanished
past in the fractured half-light, rocking --

Mount Shasta and Whitney Glacier in California, seen from the crater (Shastina): from U. S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the command of Clarence King, 1870 (U. S. Geological Survey Photographic Library)

7 comments:

Magnificent poem. Conveyance of mind's shattered materiality, its "untethering" not like any expected theological cutting of umbilical cord that turns out to be the whole kit. I was just at Lassen a couple of weekends ago, though being there with a five year old and a three year old making their first snowballs on a warm August day, the sense of earth's and my own fragility was perhaps leavened...

One of Angelica's most vivid memories is that of being taken camping at Tenaya Lake in Yosemite by her father (a photographer, by the way, and once a climber and hiker of the Alps), as a four year old.

Heaven only knows what if anything was really in the thoughts of the sad blind abandoned man at Napa, whose exploits had taken their toll. The poem (obviously) represents my own middle-of-the-night projections...

Did his broken mind really produce fractured images of crack'd rocks?

Anybody's guess.

A likelier speculation, though, would be that your daughters' memories of Lassen, like A's memories of Tenaya Lake, may well turn out to be permanent and happy ones.

"mind now moves beyond present time across the blur of a vanished/ past in the fractured half-light, rocking --"

Such photos, more of that foreground / background 'showing' just what is -- the past "vanished" but not forgotten (Mount Watkins, 8,509 feet, just two miles north of Half Dome, across Tenaya Canyon from Half Dome -- he must have made the 'first ascent,' maybe is still up there, looking out. . . .

8.24

grey whiteness of fog against invisibleridge, song sparrow calling tchep tchep in foreground, sound of wave in channel

as means matter, consist of part in fact of field

system in the sense of then, which is, measurement

grey white fog against invisible ridge,cormorant flapping across toward point

Yes, the rocks, and Mt. Watkins, at Half Dome, completing the curve -- and yes, when all stability is but a dim memory, life rocking in the dark in the arms of whatever will be.

(Gamefaced and Ed, hearing of that little temblor you had back there in the midst of putting up all this mammoth virtual geology here was a spooky moment in several ways... speaking of rocking... sitting on the Big Fault always awaiting The Big One makes all the little ones a little bit superstitious about these signs and omens, all the time.)